{ character profile }
♣ Player Information
Name: Tsuki
Journal: wasurenaikara
Age: 20
IM: xX niekochana Xx
Email: contests.go.here@gmail.com
Timezone: EST
♥ Character Information
Name: Shelke Rui
Age: 21
Personality: Though Deepground is far behind her, what they did to Shelke lingers and remains. Even at twenty-one, she still finds herself somewhat estranged from humanity. It's not that she's not making an effort so much as there is simply so much to learn. In many respects, she is still like a child. During the course of the game, she is shown as a pessimist, having abandoned hope of rescue and largely unable to comprehend the sacrifice Shalua made for her. However, at the same time Weiss' betrayal left her bewildered. All her years of interfacing only with data and being isolated from people makes human nature a complete anomaly to her. Too much of it is unpredictable and illogical. She has to learn everything almost as a newborn child, without understanding anything.
On surface, Shelke is standoffish and cold. She acts impartial to those around her, not because she is not attached to them but because she is extremely guarded in nature. At the same time, attachments are hard for her to form, so when she is making a casualty report or relaying that contact was lost with one of their squadrons, there are times when she is genuinely indifferent. Most people are only figures to her. She sees them as data, as variables to be factored into a whole. Her entire way of thinking has been hard-wired to mirror the computers she has interfaced with for a majority of her life. The networks raised her, and she has been nurtured on data streams in place of human interaction.
As she was once known as Shelke the Transparent among the Tsviets, 'transparent' is actually a very good word to describe how Shelke often acts around people she is attached to. She is fairly underdeveloped in all aspects of human interactions, and deception is among them. She tries a little bit too hard to pretend to be indifferent, and her attempts to insist that she does things only for her own gain can be fairly easy to see through. She somehow managed to turn out to be a good person in spite of the experiences of her life, and it shows.
Emotions are awkward for her to feel, but she experiences them the same as everyone else. Her ability to feel is not what is stunted, but simply her ability to understand and process the emotions. In Deepground, she shut them down because they were a hindrance to her, because they did her more harm than good, and now she simply doesn't understand them enough to fully process them again. There is a level which Shelke is terrified of all the new things in her life, of having such boundless freedom. Because of that, she holds herself back. She tests the water one foot at a time. Everything became too different in too short a span of time for her, and as a result she clings to her old ways to an extent. Deepground is, in essence, her childhood after all. Where others would have warm milk and cookies or take a hot bath to escape the stresses of the day, Shelke instead hooks herself up to her personal terminal and returns to what is familiar to her for a while.
Strengths: First and foremost, Shelke is highly intelligent. Her specialty within the Tsviets was her ability to perform Synaptic Net Dives (SNDs), and she is able to easily familiarize herself with and manipulate virtually any technology. She also downloads a great deal of information into her neuro-network, partially out of curiosity and partially out of habit, and is always working to learn more about the world around her.
Outside of her intelligence she is by no means very powerful. However, she was an established Tsviet and possesses the skill set to prove it. Counted among the strongest of the strong in that cutthroat world, Shelke's survival instincts are deeply ingrained into her and she is able to fight tooth and nail when push comes to shove. She is able to move at extremely high speeds and wields her twin electrosabers with deadly precision. She also has strong shield materia, which has saved her on more than a few occasions.
Ten years as a human experiment has also created a very tough and nigh on impossible to crack exterior on the girl, and methods of torture are highly ineffective on her. She is able to shut herself down as the situation calls for it, to keep herself from having empathy that will only cause her pain in situations where sacrifices have to be made. She is just cynical enough to know better than to try to save everyone, because she understands that there are times when that's simply not possible.
Weaknesses: Physically, Shelke extremely frail. Her body is strong enough to fight but is still that of a child's and tires easily. She requires daily Mako treatments to survive, and is even ridiculed by Azul for her physical failings. The other Tsviets see her as a hindrance and below them as far as combat goes, and they consider her worthless once she's retrieved all the information they require from her.
Her past in Deepground also acts as a double-edged blade. Though she is very difficult to break by traditional means, her emotions are so underdeveloped and unfamiliar to her that she can be easily confused and manipulated by those means. No matter how guarded she makes herself, this is still a highly exploitable flaw of hers.
Retaining the physical appearance of a ten year old even though she is twenty-one and knowing she will never age again is also something that taxes her mentally, making it harder to form connections with the world around her because she is perceived as a child more often than not. It makes her resentful of herself and the things that have happened to her, though she is stubborn and beset enough by the miseries of her past that she is unable to admit to this.
History: Though Shelke has little recollection of her life before the age of nine, she faintly recalls that she was raised by her single mother along with her older sister Shalua. The memories of any real childhood she had are fuzzy, largely blocked out by the years of torture she suffered at the hands of Deepground. What snatches she does recall are peaceful, simple. Her mother reading to them. Playing outside with her sister. They are only brief flashes of memories, though, and they carry no emotional tags. When Shelke recalls them, they are only pictures. They invoke no sense of nostalgia or sadness, no joy or comfort. They stir no feelings in her at all. Those memories feel very similar to the memories of others she downloads. They feel very much like they happened to someone else, because Shelke long ago killed her connections to her own life the day she abandoned hope of being rescued. To become an obedient soldier was the only way to survive, and the will to survive was all she had left in her.
By her own reckoning, Shelke's life truly began when she was taken away by ShinRa. She was nine years old at the time, and her mother had only just died. She was nothing more than a scared little girl who had recently suffered a great loss and endured only through the comfort offered her by her older sister. Shalua had spoken to her with such certainty, after all, that they would see their mother again. But ShinRa separated her from the only person she had left in the world. Seeing potential in her high intelligence, they processed her into Deepground. Deepground was then an experimentation station for SOLDIER, and Shelke was drafted into the bid to create a super-SOLDIER.
The experiments and treatments performed on her altered her physical chemistry drastically. She stopped aging entirely, forever trapped in a ten year old body even as the years dragged on by. She also became very physically weak, and she required daily Mako treatments to survive because her body became reliant on it. The one thing that Deepground developed in her was her mind. She was molded into an intelligence mining machine of a person, able to perform Synaptic Net Dives to interface with the Worldwide Network and gather information from virtually any network within range.
It was nothing short of torture, and Shelke described her experience in Deepground as Hell beyond imagination. For ten years, she suffered and endured, clutching tightly to an ever weakening thread of hope that someone would come to rescue her. No one ever did. One day she stopped waiting and fell quietly in line with the rest of her kind. She did whatever she had to in order to survive, eventually establishing herself as one of the Tsviets when Weiss took over Deepground.
As a Tsviet, Shelke prioritized her missions above all else because they were all she had to give her life focus and purpose. She took her responsibilities seriously and acted more a machine than a girl. In fact, her experiences in Deepground overwhelmed her personality to the point where even when faced with a reunion with her sister after a ten year absence, she continued to try to carry out her mission. It was perhaps at this point that her personality and past began to return to her. After being admonished by Reeve for being blind to everything Shalua had done to try to save her, though Shelke attempted to carry out her mission, she did hesitate and was unable to kill her sister. After that, she was defeated by Vincent and taken into their custody.
Shortly after, Azul broke loose within WRO headquarters and made an attempt on Shelke's life after mocking her for her physical fragility. According to him, she had outlived her usefulness as she had gotten them all the data they needed--data which could not be allowed to fall into the WRO's hands. Shelke had to be terminated. Weiss had ordered it himself. To Shelke, this was betrayal beyond imagining. She had been nothing but loyal, had given everything she had and was to the Tsviets. They were all she knew in the world, and they wanted her dead. She managed to freeze Azul with her shield materia, but then faltered in her confusion even as Shalua tried to save her life. In the end, her sister sacrificed her own life to save Shelke's, which left Shelke in nothing but confusion. Things such as self sacrifice were utterly foreign to her. She couldn't understand what would drive a person to do such a thing.
From then on, Shelke cooperated with the WRO because she had nowhere else to go, or at least that was what she liked to believe. It was more comfortable for her at that point to believe that it was a matter of convenience for her, and not because she wanted to help Vincent. But it was the latter that was true, a desire borne out of the memory fragments of Lucrecia inside of her. She had downloaded data of Lucrecia's work into her mind as part of the effort to locate Vincent, and after witnessing her sister's sacrifice for her, the memories and emotions of Lucrecia began to defragment in her mind. This also helped her regain some of her own suppressed emotions, and her development as a person finally began anew.
After the events of the game, Shelke went to live at the Seventh Heaven bar, able to begin living in earnest with her former Tsviet comrades all dead and Omega defeated.
♠ Roleplaying Samples
First person:
Uplink complete. Terminating connection. Now exiting SND.
[sigh]
Another failure. I am still unable to decode the encryption on Shalua Rui's personal research files. I have ascertained that it is an asymmetric key algorithm. I do not believe that my sister possessed the decryption key. If not her, then who...?
But that is irrelevant. I will resume decryption efforts tomorrow, at 0600 hours.
Saving recording...
End transmission.
Third person:
"Now purging Dr. Crescent's files from my neuro-network."
Shelke's words echoed almost mechanically against the metal walls of her personal terminal, her safe room she had built for herself out of both want and necessity. In actuality it was her bedroom, but it looked more like a research lab than anywhere a person actually lived. In fact, though Shelke would write off any similarities as coincidental, it looked quite a bit like the underground labs of Deepground.
There was a terminal from which she could perform her SNDs, a chamber from which she could receive her life-sustaining Mako treatments, and a door which could lock in the event she needed the privacy. Though she tried to spend a fair amount of time associating with the others--Tifa, Yuffie, Vincent, Cloud and everyone else they worked with who stopped by from time to time--she spent the time that remained in her room, continuing some of her sister's research while pursuing some of her own. She was currently working on a way to stabilize her mental state while performing SNDs. After interfacing with Omega, she had begun to consider the possibility of interfacing with the Lifestream directly. It would be an invaluable scientific breakthrough, opening the way to limitless information from the countless souls which had returned to the Planet. However, in every simulation she had run thus far, her residual self had been torn apart by the strain of being within the Lifestream. It was still far from a perfect science, but if she continued to work at it, perhaps in her lifetime she could--
'Is it alright if I return to the Planet...?'
--offer the WRO a staggering advantage in their bid to restore the world.
But that was not what she was doing now. Over the years, she had begun to develop her own feelings, her own hopes and dreams. She had started to recognize that Lucrecia's wishes were not her own, and as long as she carried the memories inside of her she would never entirely be herself. She was relying on Lucrecia's emotions as a crutch, trying to use them to interpret the world when they had never been hers to use. And so Shelke had come to a decision, to purge those memories and focus on living as herself.
"46 percent... 61... 78... 93... Purge complete. Clearing all latent information from the cache. Deletion complete."
A sigh left Shelke's lips as she relaxed against her seat, shutting off her visor without removing it just yet. For a while, she simply stared at the blank screen, trying to put a name to how she felt. She didn't know. Had purging Lucrecia's memories from her neuro-network resulted in the desired effect? Did she feel better? Did she feel worse?
Human emotion and psychology were more complex than Shelke had ever imagined. She just didn't know.
"I am sorry, Vincent Valentine," she mumbled, removing her visor as she slowly shut her eyes. Perhaps if she slept on it, she would know. It was not as though the data was irretrievable. "I have to live as my own person now."